I’ve been seeing comments for years about how Communism and Fascism are both leftist. That doesn’t surprise me. What has been surprising is to therefore see the right donning Nazi symbols and defending Putin. Aren’t those exactly the leftist isms they’ve been denouncing? If the point is that conservatives are reflexively opposed to any leftist attitudes, how is that possible?
But that makes as much sense as that chart. Mob rule is extreme right? Monarchy is as far left as Socialism? Do any conservatives see anarchists as the representatives of liberty?
This is why I don’t identify as left or right: both sides want to use the police power of government to force me to do things, or not do things. But while both sides are guilty, I do believe the left’s wish-list (on using government to restrict my freedoms) is longer than the right’s wish-list.
I find that I no longer care how Republicans see anything. The last decade or so, but especially a year ago, has proven that so-called party is a domestic terrorist organization, sadly with many members in local, state, and federal legislatures. The more people who realize this and then “unelect” them, the better.
On restricting your freedoms, personally, maybe. I’m guessing you’re a heterosexual white cis male? But there are plenty of other people for whom they want to restrict all freedoms, including in some cases even the freedom to live.
It’s tribalism. Tribalists are uniformly authoritarian in their thinking—‘it’s Us versus Them, and the only way to deal with Them is to kill them all.’
Right-wing movements worldwide are tribalist, and the ones we’re most aware of (in the US and in Europe) are pretty consistently white-supremacist. Us versus Them.
Of course there are authoritarian right-wing tribalist groups in nations of the world in which non-white people contend against other non-white people and label them as being of the Wrong Tribe and want to Kill Them All, so I don’t want to say that ‘authoritarianism is always white-supremacist.’ But in the “western world,” so to speak, it is.
Yes, extreme leftists are generally as authoritarian as are extreme right-wingers. I would guess that individuals from both groups would score high on tests of that trait (having an attraction or orientation toward authoritarianism.)
Leftist can be somewhat white-supremacist (and male supremacist) in practice, too, though “officially” that’s not something they’d embrace. As Stokely Carmichael famously said back in the 60s, “the only position for women in SNCC is prone”—and perhaps he was enjoying asserting superiority to females in reaction to the fact that his white allies covertly asserted superiority to him (as a black man).
It’s one of the attractions of tribalist-authoritarianism that it’s easy—you never have to bestir yourself to think.
For the rest of us, the world is a complex place and requires a lot of thought to navigate. For the authoritarian, it’s simple: good or evil.
(Think of the cognitive dissonance that must be going on in many right-wing circles just recently, with the original line-to-be-adopted being ‘who cares about Ukraine, it’s nothing to do with us, Russia is cool’----which in recent days has had to painfully morph into ‘we admire the brave Ukrainians.’
(There are a lot of broken brains out there, no doubt.)
Columnist George WIll recently noted that Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance (whose book, incidentally, I really liked), who is now running for the U.S. Senate nomination in Ohio, stated two weeks before the invasion that he “(didn’t) really care what happens in Ukraine”.
He suddenly reversed that position. Likely, after some underpaid staffer informed Vance that there are 43,000 Ukrainian-Americans in Ohio.
With regards to the chart in the OP, I think it works better if you visualize the spectrum as a horseshoe or even a circle rather than a straight line - the extremist positions are frequently close to each other and far from the center, and you don’t have to pass through the center to get from one extreme to the other.
Thinking about it, I think a better visualization isn’t a straight line or a line bent into a circle, but one of those XY grid things, with the vertical axis being corporate <——> populist and the horizontal axis being liberal <———> conservative.
These responses don’t make any sense to me. Speaking English as a second language doesn’t mean that someone is wrong. And a piece about why Putin made the wrong choice doesn’t make much sense as a Russian propaganda piece. And, reading though, the only thing I could see it possibly being propaganda for is Biden—but then ESL errors wouldn’t make sense.
I read it. It puts together some stuff we know about what happened. It misses some things, like explaining why the Russian military is so much worse than expected, and incorrectly claims Biden lacks foreign policy experience. But the general idea that Putin thought he could get away with it because he’s gotten away with similar stuff in the past and misjudged the West as weaker that we were (especially after Trump) is not unfounded.
There are some on the extreme left that are pretty intolerant- those are the guys that were advocating “we’re going to use BBB to get everything we could possibly want and if we can’t get absolutely everything then to hell with it we’ll hold our breath and turn blue.” There is some degree of intolerance as well- look how Franken got ousted for simulating a pose of groping a woman. Gotta be 100% politically correct, now and at every point in your past and if you’re not-you’re out. But to be fair, they’re in the minority of the party. The vast majority of Democrats will compromise with each other and with Republicans, if given a chance.
The Republicans are much more in lockstep and intolerant of any dissent within the party. Anyone who advocates anything slightly left of their position must be fought to the last drop of blood.
I’d say regarding authoritarianism- Republicans are infinitely more authoritative in terms of party discipline. Democrats are more authoritative on I believe exactly one issue- gun control, whereas Republicans are more authoritative on criminal law, women’s reproductive rights, and intolerance of minority rights.
I agree with Franken politically on a lot of things and I think as far as gropy-rapey behavior goes he’s very far from the worst public figure out there. But I think you’re considerably whitewashing the situation when you claim that what got him ousted was merely “simulating a pose of groping”. Nope, there were numerous credible allegations of actual groping.
Franken was a valuable liberal legislator and it’s a damn shame he couldn’t keep his hands and his tongue to himself better than he managed to do. But there are a whole lot of male politicians out there who seem to be able to be cordial and friendly around other people without putting their hands or mouths on nonconsenting women, and Franken should not expect to be excused from meeting those very minimal standards of basic decent behavior.
If you think that view makes me some kind of standard-bearer of “extreme left” “intolerance”, well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on that.